This thesis presents accounts of a range of linguistic phenomena in an extended categorial framework, and develops proposals for processing grammars set within this framework. Linguistic phenomena whose treatment we address include word order, grammatical relations and obliqueness, extraction and island constraints, and binding. The work is set within a flexible categorial framework which is a version of the Lambek calculus (Lambek, 1958) extended by the inclusion of additional type-forming operators whose logical behaviour allows for the characterization of some aspect of linguistic phenomena. We begin with the treatment of extraction phenomena and island constraints. An account is developed in which there are many interrelated notions of boundary, and where the sensitivity of any syntactic process to a particular class of boundaries can be addressed within the grammar. We next present a new categorial treatment of word order which factors apart the specification of the order of a h...

In this article I present a series of arguments that syntactic structures are built incrementally, in a strict left-to-right order. By assuming incremental structure building it becomes possible to explain the differences between the range of constituents available to different diagnostics of constituency, including movement, ellipsis, coordination, scope and binding. In an incremental derivation structure building creates new constituents, and in doing so may destroy existing constituents. The article presents detailed evidence for the prediction of incremental grammar, that a syntactic process may refer to only those constituents that are present at the point in the derivation when the process applies. Keywords: phrase structure, constituency, incrementality, coordination, binding, scope, ellipsis, movement. 1. Introduction Tests of constituency are basic components of the syntactician's toolbox. By investigating which strings of words can and cannot be moved, deleted...

This paper argues that well-known conflicts between the results of different syntactic constituency tests do not arise if it is assumed that phrase markers are incrementally built from left-to-right, as dictated by the condition MERGE RIGHT. I show that results which have been taken to

This paper argues for the significance of argument structure and linear order in the binding conditions of Balinese (an Austronesian language with about 3,000,000 speakers, primarily on the islands of Bali and western Lombok, Indonesia). Our analysis employs the theory of prominence due to Bresnan (1995a,b). We show that linear order, thematic prominence, and the term/oblique distinction are crucial to Balinese binding, while other aspects of syntactic rank (e.g. SUBJ versus OBJ) play little or no role. We propose to define binding at a level of argument structure incorporating the term/oblique distinction (following Manning 1994).

This paper presents a categorial account of binding, which was first described in Hepple (1990).

This thesis provides an analysis of scrambling, following the Minimalist program of Chomsky 1992, examining Hindi as a case study and occasionally making comparisons with Japanese. The first major claim is that there are two kinds of operations that yield scrambling. One type, called Outer scrambling, is an Operator-Variable construction and is the result of movement. The other type, called Inner scrambling, is the result of several conspiring factors that allow permutation without movement. These factors are triggered by (i) the strength feature of functional heads (ii) Economy principles that hold at phonological form and (iii) Full Interpretation, which causes the Agr structure to be deleted after its agreement relations have been established. These factors cause TnsP to collapse into an N-ary branching structure containing the arguments of the verb. It is assumed that linear order is not fixed until Spellout. Therefore, the N-ary branching structure is free to yield permutations wi...

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